Good morning,
Here’s what you’ll find in today’s DTC:
You’re reading this newsletter along with new subscribers from: BoyBeads, Ketolibriyum, and LoDo Shots. 👋
🎉 Our Slack Was Full of Q4 Wins. Was Yours?
All Q4 long, the Pilothouse Slack channels were filled with wins.
Those wins didn’t happen by accident. They came from strong systems, clear decision-making, and teams that knew how and when to scale when it counted.
If your Q4 felt quieter than you hoped, now is the moment to step back and evaluate what held you back and what needs to change.
Pilothouse has a few spaces open in Q1 to partner with brands to build growth systems that perform under pressure and scale with confidence.
Your wins for next year start compounding now.
💰 Push Prospecting in January!
After two months of holiday-heavy retargeting, most brands walk into January with the same problem: a warmed-up audience… and an empty top of funnel.
If you want to avoid a Q1 slump, now’s the moment to rebuild prospecting momentum and refill the pipeline.
Here’s how the Pilothouse team recommends kicking off January strong:
1️⃣ Shift Your Prospecting / Retargeting Split
Q4 is a retargeting machine, but January requires the opposite.
Increase your Meta budget toward 85%+ prospecting to bring in net-new traffic and reset your top-of-funnel flow.
Without fresh audience volume, performance will flatline fast.
2️⃣ Align Creative With January Intent
People are in “reset mode.”
Build ads that speak to new routines, healthy habits, and getting back on track. Show how your product fits into daily life as consumers rebuild structure after the holidays.
3️⃣ Build Creative for Cold Audiences
January is the perfect moment for new educational and awareness-driven angles.
Your job: clearly articulate the problem your audience is facing and show how your product solves it.
Try simple, high-clarity hooks like:
4️⃣ Add Social Proof Everywhere
Testimonials, CGC, and short customer clips build trust fast, especially with cold audiences seeing you for the first time.
Authenticity beats polish in January.
The takeaway?
Treat January like a full-funnel rebuild:
Over-invest in prospecting, anchor your creative in “new year” intent, and use problem-solution messaging to warm up cold traffic quickly.
Monitor CPAs and ROAS closely, iterate weekly, and you’ll rebuild volume and momentum before most brands even start to recover.
🎧 Where Should That Click Go? Landing Pages, Homepages, and PDPs
In this episode, Taylor breaks down why most brands treat their homepage like a catch-all and how that one mistake quietly tanks conversion, wastes ad dollars, and muddies every test you run.
Taylor’s Landing Page Framework unpacks the real job of a landing page, and shows you how to build pages that match buyer intent, turning random creative wins into predictable, repeatable conversion lifts.
In this episode, we get into:
▶️ Watch the full episode on YouTube here.
🎧 Or click here to listen on Spotify.
Ad strategist Fraser Cottrell shares that these three phrases instantly reveal low-quality UGC.
They’re the hallmark of AI-written scripts and creators who don’t understand how real customers talk.
Shoppers can feel the inauthenticity immediately, and it kills trust.
Instead try talking about the problem they had, what they tried, what surprised them, or what actually changed in their day-to-day life.
🤝 Get Up To Speed On The Latest TikTok Deal Developments
It’s official. TikTok isn’t leaving the U.S.
Instead, it’s becoming a new U.S.-controlled app after the deal closes on January 22nd.
The breakdown: U.S. investors Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGC will hold roughly 45% of the business while ByteDance will retain under 20% to satisfy national security demands.
Oracle will control the algo and ByteDance won’t be able to access U.S. user data moving forward.
However, users will be required to transition to the new platform and it’s uncertain which features will stay.
📥 Got a B2B Biz?
Join dozens of B2B companies finding demand-gen success through our niche community of 150k brand leaders and founders this year. Talk to our team to learn more.
Have you heard our latest podcasts?
Don’t forget to rate the DTC Podcast on Apple (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)
DTC Newsletter is written by Rebecca Knight and Frances Du. Edited by Eric Dyck.
Please note that items in this newsletter marked with * contain sponsored content.
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
